Looking Beyond The Pacs

December 10, 1985

In dealing with the sensitive issue of campaign financing, the U.S. Senate has taken a bold course of nonaction. It has voted 84 to 7 to keep alive a bill restricting political action committees. But it has also referred the bill to committee for study, thus neutralizing it at least until spring.

That wasn`t a bad compromise. If the senators didn`t do anything about the wildly proliferating PACs, at least they refrained from doing anything regrettable. And since the PAC problem is a direct result of earlier efforts to limit campaign spending, more of the same will not solve it.

The bill which was put on hold would limit the aggregate amount of money a candidate could receive from PACs and lower the current cap on individual PAC contributions from $5,000 to $3,000. It would also require broadcasting stations to grant a candidate equal time to reply to hostile campaign ads financed by a PAC.

For incumbent congressmen, this would be an inexpensive form of re-election insurance. It would add to the campaign advantages they already have --name recognition, opportunities to make news, free-mail privileges--by restricting their challengers` access to funds and their freedom to attack the incumbent`s record.

In other words, this bill repeats and compounds the very mistakes that made PACs a problem to start with.

The committees have mushroomed in recent years because Congress clamped the same kinds of restrictions on individual campaign contributions. The result was that money which would have gone directly to the candidates was instead channeled through PACs, which did not have the same restrictions. Naturally, they multiplied to represent special interests of every kind, and so did their spending; in 1984 PACs spent a staggering $100 million to influence elections.

That set off new cries of alarm about money dominating the election process. The regulators keep hoping that more restrictions on voters will somehow make them spend less on the candidates and causes they favor; the theory seems to be that if you build a big enough dam on a river, the water will dry up.

But if the last experiment with controls proved anything, it was that people who want to support a candidate will find ways to do it, and that piling on new legal restrictions merely generates new ways to get around them. Sen. Thomas Eagleton (D., Mo.) came a lot closer to identifying the problem. The PACs` dominant role in fundraising, he said, is ``a manifestation of the incredible, scandalous cost of campaigns--the greatest threat facing American democracy.``

Finding a solution to that might be no easier. But at least the reformers would be facing in the right direction.